


the remembered earth

by a_good_soldier



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Abandonment Issues, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Bad Parent John Winchester, Case Fic, Colonialism, Established Relationship, Gen, Gross misinterpretation of Catholic theology, Homophobia, John's Journal, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Racism, Settler Colonialism, Sexual Abuse, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-16 21:48:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29460792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_good_soldier/pseuds/a_good_soldier
Summary: 25 years later, Dean returns to Riverton, Wyoming.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 23
Kudos: 113





	the remembered earth

**Author's Note:**

> Look. This is a weird fic. It’s 2021 and I’m writing a fic about three white guys going to a mission in Wyoming, while attempting to strike a balance between “christianity as a tool of imperialism is wrong” (real-world fact) and “God and angels are real” ( _Supernatural_ -world fact).
> 
> Re: the tags — there is a spoilery summary of the fic in the end notes so you can see the general gist of the potential triggers. This fic deals with really heavy things — as respectfully as possible, but imperfectly because I'm not an authority on the ongoing impacts of colonial genocide in Indigenous communities — so please take care of yourselves.
> 
> For context: a few weeks ago an officially-endorsed(?) version of John Winchester's journal was floating around Tumblr. It included an excerpt about Dean's seventeenth birthday, when John sent him on a hunt. The excerpt is the opening of the fic, so no need to go looking for it — just letting you know that that's what sparked this whole thing. The excerpt contains the only use of the word "Indian" in this fic. I want to be clear that I'm firmly against evangelism and Christian boarding/residential/mission schools in colonial contexts, and I hope this fic shows that they are inherently evil (and the problem isn't just "bad apples" within the broader system). also edit: deleted my cringe even longer settler guilt a/n lmao what was i THINKING. but also if you want to talk more about this happy to have a convo in the comments or over on tumblr [@agoodsoldier](https://agoodsoldier.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Title from N. Scott Momaday: "Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk."

**January 24, 1996:**

Dean turns seventeen today. We went shooting. Then I sent him out on his first hunt. I’ve let him take the lead before, but I’ve always been there to back him up. This time he’s on his own. Partly it’s a test, and partly I wanted some time with Sammy. Should be no problem for Dean. Ghosts of two nuns haunting St. Stephen’s Indian Mission in Riverton, Wyoming. Simple salt-and-burn mission. Nuns in love with each other, then discovered. Killed themselves. We scoped the situation out, figured that something must be left behind that’s now a focus for the haunting. Bible, rosary beads, some small article that’s hidden somewhere in their room. I figured Dean would take care of it no problem, but I still stayed close by with Sammy.

* * *

“You know I don’t like missions, Dean,” Castiel mutters from the back seat.

Dean scoffs, but it’s not like Sam disagrees. Honestly, the whole thing puts the colonial war on native people into full focus the way few of their other hunts do, and Sam itches with it, not sure where he fits in, what with his own landlessness coming by way of his father’s choices and not the US military.

“Cheer up, sunshine,” Dean says, turning onto Mission Road. “Can’t take us more’n a day, since these folks’re less inclined to get in our way than most.”

“And why are you so sure of that, Dean?” Sam tries to get a read on him but Dean’s cagey, keeps his focus on the squat brown brick building coming up on their left rather than meeting Sam’s eyes.

“Dad worked a case here a while back, like I said.”

“Yeah, but back when Dad was working cases these places still used child abuse as their primary pedagogical tool, so excuse me if I’m hoping things have changed.” God. Sam’s inclined to give his dad a little more slack these days, knows how goddamn hard it is to fall in love with someone and lose them and keep pressing on, can’t imagine trying to do that with two kids, but he’ll never understand the blind faith Dean still has in a few, strange pockets of what Dad taught them.

Sam watches Dean’s throat bob. “It’s more than just the people who were there. It’s part of their whole MO or whatever. They’ve got faith in more’n just God, here.”

“Then let them show it.” Cas sounds angry, even angrier than he was when Sam got the alert and Dean pushed them to take it. _Looks like a ghost, right? Easy hunt, get us out there, we can hole up at the mission_. Dean rolls into the parking lot and turns the key.

“All right. I dunno what the hell’s goin’ on with you two, but you better stow it. Got it?”

“Yeah.” Sam gets out of the car before Dean can say anything else about it.

* * *

The secretary behind the office desk seems nice enough, and points them towards an office labeled FATHER PETERS. Dean knocks.

The man who answers the door is wearing dark robes and a white collar, standard fare. His narrow glasses remind Sam, strangely, of the reading glasses Samuel Campbell would occasionally acquiesce to wearing, practical and begrudging.

“Father,” Dean says, smiling. And then, before Sam can launch into his concerned-social-worker voice, he says, “Heard you were having some trouble. My name is Dean Winchester.”

What the _fuck_. But the father softens, weirdly, gives him an actual smile. “Ah, yes. I heard a lot about your father, John.”

“I’m sure.” Dean laughs awkwardly, and cuts his gaze away from Sam when Sam tries to make eye contact. Seriously. What the fuck?

Father Peters looks at Sam and Cas. “Are you both Dean’s brothers?”

“No, uh—”

Cas interrupts him. “Sam is Dean’s brother. My name is Castiel.”

The father nods slowly. “I see. Well. Welcome, to all of you.” Then he smiles again, and says, “Let me show you around.”

The land around the mission is— well, it’s empty. It’s big and flat, wide open sky the way all of Wyoming is, the way everything is before you get to the Rockies. Sam inhales and the air burns his nose, cold and clean like an apple right off the tree. Every low and ugly building is an incongruous hiccup, like a forest hacked away to tree stumps. The church presides over it all, regally.

Father Peters takes them to that church first. The stained glass window above the door reminds Sam, oddly, of Anna. The church her dad the deacon preached at. He hasn’t thought about Anna in years. Hasn’t thought about anything around that time, all of it hazy with demon blood and the distance of centuries.

“I like to bring people here first,” the father says. “It gives me a sense of peace, to be in God’s house. This is what the mission really is. The rest of it — the buildings, the cars, even the grass and the clouds outside — is just decoration.”

Sam twitches his lips, wonders if it comes across like he’s smiling, being validating. Dean’s off in his head God knows where, eyes all over the ceiling, while Cas is glaring at his feet. Jesus Christ. “That’s great, Father, really,” Sam finally says. “We, uh, is this— do you have anywhere we can talk about, about what’s been going on these past few weeks?”

“Yes, let’s— let me set you up, in case you stay overnight. We can talk about it on the way.”

“Great,” Dean says, tuning back into the conversation abruptly, “that’s great, Father, thanks.”

Father Peters leads them down the aisle, back to the sunlight. Before he steps over the threshold, though, Cas asks, “Father. How many would you say could fit in this church?”

The father turns around, half-laughing already. “I— that’s an odd question, Castiel.”

“Humor me.”

Father Peters looks around consideringly. “Well. When we have a full house, that’s about two hundred people, so maybe, if you really squished ‘em in, three hundred? If folks stayed in the kitchens and the hallway, too.”

A slim, pathetic moment of silence stretches thin between them. And then, snapping it quick as the crack of a bone, Cas says, “The _grass outside_ sustained thousands before the arrival of your God.” He stares the father right in the face. “Under those circumstances, I’d consider your church the decoration.”

Cas brushes past him, out into the open, and the father looks back at the two of them. Dean shrugs. Sam tries, “He, uh— he’s a history buff, you know.”

“We get all sorts here,” the father says. He sighs. “I hope the history of our forebears doesn’t turn him from the Lord.”

“Trust me, buddy, there’s a hell of a lot more to Cas turning away from the Lord,” Dean says, clapping the father on the shoulder, and Sam follows him right out the door.

* * *

“Oh, we only need two rooms,” Sam says instinctively when the father starts to get three sets of keys off the wall.

The man looks between them oddly. Before Sam can put it together — hell, before Sam’s even done speaking, almost — Dean steps up, claps Sam on the shoulder. “My brother’n I are used to sharing on the road,” Dean drawls, “had a lotta motel stays as kids. No need to put yourself out makin’ up an extra.”

Father Peters relaxes. “Of course.”

The hallway is bright yellow and has a big window at the end of it, flooded with natural light. All to say, it doesn’t look too horror movie, but Sam still — especially now, especially in religious places, especially next to churches vandalizing land that was sacred before God became God — thinks of that hallway so many years ago, where he first saw a vision of Lucifer’s hooks in him, and thought the Lord was telling him to go there.

Dean takes the keys from Father Peters and gives one set to Cas. “Thanks, Father,” he says. “We’ll get some things squared away an’ then we might head out for dinner. ‘Less you got a kitchen here?”

“I can have the students bring something up for you, if you’d like. Service is, after all, part of the Lord’s message.”

“Thank you,” Cas says, opening his mouth for the first time since that disastrous church conversation, startling them all with the scraping bass of his voice, “but there’s no need to inconvenience the children. We’ll find our own food.”

The father frowns, something unpleasant in the curve of his shoulders. Still, hard to argue with the idea of keeping kids in class. “Of course, Castiel.”

He leaves, turning to look back at them, once, before he disappears around the corner. The three of them look at each other, and then Dean unlocks the door closest to them.

Safe inside the privacy of their guest room, Sam says, “Smart thinking back there, telling him we were brothers,” hoping the walls aren’t too thin.

“Huh?”

Sam looks between Dean and Cas, sees Cas’s hunched over shoulders, the way Dean’s avoiding anyone’s eyes. But hell, he’s gotten this far. “The way you, uh. I mean. It’s 2021, y’know, I’d— I’d honestly forgotten about, like. Homophobia. I mean we live in such a bubble now, you know? Probably wouldn’t have gone over too well if Father Peters realized you two were gonna be sharing a room.”

Dean barks a laugh. “Right.” Mouth quirking, he says, “So, anyway—”

“You’ve been here before,” Castiel says suddenly. “I didn’t— I hadn’t realized it until now. I don’t know what made me think of it. But you’ve been here before.”

“What?” Jesus, Dean, you’d think they might’ve learned their lesson about secrets— “Dean, c’mon.”

Sam watches Dean inhale, exhale, watches the way he clenches his fist. “Look, okay, it’s not a big deal.”

“Clearly is, if you lied about it.”

“Shut up.” Dean glares at Cas, and says, pointedly, “Just didn’t wanna deal with a bunch of questions about a hunt I worked— hell, I don’t even remember how many years ago.”

Cas looks away. “My apologies, Dean.”

Sam sighs. “Fine. We’re talking about this later, though.”

“Fuckin’ great.” Dean pulls out his laptop. “Can we focus on the case now?”

Sam flips through the folders the father gave them, feeling a familiar sensation of disappearing as he reads them. It’s a weird secondhand grief that he can’t feel — he reads about kids, dying, strung up on nooses in a cold barn two hours after midnight, and his whole body shuts down like he can’t cope with it. He hasn’t really coped with anything very well since the first time Lucifer went inside him and scooped him out clean.

Dean, of course, is patching over it all with abrasive gusto. “So. Three kids so far, right?”

“Yeah. Brutal deaths.” Sam reads the report card notes. “Looks like all three of ‘em were troublemakers, no focus in class, that kinda thing.”

“Evidence they wanted to off themselves, though?”

Cas shoots Dean a look.

“What? I’m— I mean, yeah, it’s awful, but the story is they hanged themselves. I’m just trying to cover our bases here.”

“A ten year old, though?” Sam sighs. He can’t even really remember being ten. The first time he thought about dying — not that he ever really thought about it like this, in a serious and measured and considered way, but — was in high school. Late in high school, too, senior year. It was just teenage angst, a strange look thrown his way by his Spanish teacher and because of it, the all-encompassing sense that there was something evil inside him, something that marked him for all of these nice, normal people to see. “Anyway,” Sam says, trying not to think of it, of why he might’ve felt so wrong in his skin and whether it’s the same reason he feels so wrong in it now, “it doesn’t seem like that kinda thing. They were just rowdy or distracted.”

“The first one, though,” Dean says. “I mean, I think it is a ghost. But seventeen is a… I mean, people commit suicide at seventeen. It’s plausible.”

“Christ.” Sam flips through the pages. “Look, I just— I can’t find any evidence of, of depression or anything. The notes barely mention them. It’s all just, _Jamie struggles to focus on class material_ and _Pedro’s reading is less advanced than his peers_.”

“We’ll need to investigate further,” Cas says, unfortunately.

Cas sits at the table next to Dean. Sam watches him put his hand out on the table, casual, like he’s resting it there and it just happens to be within reaching distance. Dean looks up. He catches Sam’s eye. He looks in the vague vicinity of Cas’s shoulder. He doesn’t take Cas’s hand.

Sam sighs. “Should we head out?”

“Yeah.” Dean closes his laptop, slides it into a bag before Cas can say a word. “Let’s go.”

* * *

On their way out, Peters catches Dean by the arm. “Dean,” he says, low enough to be private, but loud enough for all three of them to hear. “You know, Sister Beatriz always spoke very highly of you and your father to me, said you’d always be welcome here.”

Dean flushes red, discomfort in his eyes, Sam can see it. What the hell— “That’s very kind of her, Father.”

“She’s still over down in her old room, you could pay her a visit if you’d like. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”

Dean freezes. “Sure will,” he says eventually, hoarsely, and Sam watches his brother — a forty-three year old man, lethal and steadfast, more sure of himself now than Sam’s ever known him — hunker down on himself like a kid.

It’s something about this place that’s getting to him, Sam knows it. They escape the main office, Dean staying a full five feet away from Cas like if he gets too close the mission staff will string him up over a bonfire and let him burn. He keeps Sam between them like a shield. Sam thought he’d be done getting between Dean and Cas once they got their shit together.

Still. They are on a case. The three of them make it back out into the real world. “We should split up,” Sam says, mostly because it’s true, but also partially just to get that hunted look off Dean’s face. Give both Dean and Cas a little breathing room. “Me and Cas can go look at the barn where the kids, you know. And you know the folks here, you could ask around.”

“I—” Dean looks between the two of them wildly, and Sam wonders if he’s going to say no. Braces for it, for the overprotection he can feel wafting off Dean like cologne. But Dean just says, “Yeah, makes sense.”

Cas frowns. “If you’d prefer, Sam could go question the staff—”

“No, no,” Dean says, half-laughing, refusing to meet their eyes, “it’s not a big deal, and like Sam says, it just makes sense. Better this way.”

Sam waits, but Cas doesn’t object. “Great,” he says, trying to force calm into his voice. “Back here in two hours?”

“Ten-four,” Dean says, throwing off a sloppy salute and wandering away before they can even reply. Sam looks at Cas, but Cas is watching Dean go.

* * *

He figures he’ll make his way to the kids first. They know the people who died, probably a hell of a lot better than the adults around here.

Last time Dean was here, big boots and Dad’s jacket keeping him from the sky, he was their age. Seventeen. Just as free and wild as all the kids he’s seen skulking around, which is to say, crushed under the weight of American empire as heavy as any shroud.

He never talked to any of them. He can feel it now, the same fear of himself that kept him from saying hi to the teenagers making up beds and sliding trays down at the caf. Like he’s a kid again, flinching away from the Father’s eyes — but it’s not like Sam thinks, not like Dean’s completely out of it. Dean knows how to take care of himself. He’s not going to let a shitty case push everything up from under the dirt where he’s buried it.

A small stream passes through the property, separating the dorms and the chapel from the staff residences. Dean follows the bank down from the dorm, angling towards the classrooms he can see in the distance. The thing about plains like this is that all the small trees — little shrubs, round and brittle, nothing like the Californian redwoods or even the Virginia conifers — grow at half-height and half-density, cut down by the wind and the sun and the solitude. Dean can see right through them.

The chapel comes up to his left. He remembers Sister Beatriz, maybe in her fifties then, stumbling across him in the middle of the night on the grounds behind the chapel. Took pity on him, even though she’d only heard of him from Dad’s recommendation, the phone call that sent Dean from that motel room out onto his first hunt.

She saw something in him. Took him back into the church right across the very grass he’s walking on after he’d salted and burned those rosaries. Prayed over him.

He shrugs off the chill. That wind, always fast and vicious in the plains.

Beatriz never said a word about it. Neither did Dad, but Dean figured what it was for, the hunt and the prayer both. Anybody could see it, branded on his forehead, the truth of how he looked at the men around him, wide-eyed and obvious until he buried it as deep as he could. Christ. Here he is, more’n thirty years later, crushing sagebrush under his boots because he can’t even look at Cas under the watchful eye of Father Peters. It’s uncanny: there’s the warmth that always rises in his chest when he sees Cas, next to the memory of Dad’s grip on his shoulder, the strictly controlled anger that Dean had to listen for in that Lake Superior voice of his, quiet and profound. Dad would say _pack it up, kid_ and Dean would know — he’d know, from the way Dad said it, the depth of the anger under it.

Maybe he made up that anger. Dean kicks a pebble into the stream, watches it settle. The sun beats down on him like a lover. Maybe Dad didn’t even know about any of it, maybe he wasn’t even angry at all. Maybe Dean did it all to himself.

* * *

EMF gets them a hit in the barn, which adds a serious checkmark in favor of ghosts. Of course, none of it has the easy camaraderie Sam remembers from when him and Dean went on hunts before Hell, not with three children in body bags. Probably not even Dean’s janky Walkman-meter could get a smile out of Sam today.

Once he’s back out under the blue, cloudless sky, Sam asks Cas, “What was Dean doing here?”

Cas squints menacingly at the priest crossing the road maybe twenty yards away from under the shade of the barn’s doorway. “It’s not really my business to say,” he says eventually.

“Okay, but like.” Sam doesn’t know how to word it. “Did he get… hurt? Should we call someone else in, get him outta this place?”

Cas shakes his head. Quietly, he says, “I… I admit, I never understood it. Can’t understand the way he felt about it, even now.”

Sam curls his fingernails into his palm. “Okay. Okay.” He hates— he hates this, hates tripping over Dean’s memories everywhere they go. It’s the tiniest bud of resentment, that Dean was able to make memories — awful and evil as they were — anywhere across this godforsaken country, while Sam was transferred from motel room to motel room like a prisoner in solitary confinement until he made the only real choice he ever had, the one that ended up with him in a real cage. But more than that, of course, is the grief Sam feels for Dean, the ever-present worry that Dean will never get to live anywhere without mourning dogging at his heels.

“He wasn’t injured here,” Castiel says, frowning. “There wasn’t— He was here on his seventeenth birthday.”

Oh _Christ_. He remembers the way Dean had come back, freshly seventeen, the way he’d said, _Dad gave me the night off for my birthday. How ‘bout that, Sammy?_ He’d asked, _You enjoy your time with Dad?_

Sam had said, _Yeah, whatever_ , because he hadn’t known how to say _I missed you_. He remembers that Dean had flinched, and Sam had deliberately decided not to notice, because Dean was the one who’d gotten to have an underage party or whatever the fuck while Sam had to listen to Dad reminisce about Mom after four fingers of whiskey and then wake him up at one in the morning to ask him if he was doing his homework, if Dean was making him do his homework. Sam had answered _Yes, sir_ , breathless, because he knew there was a threat under it all even if it never came fully formed out of the darkness, not really.

And the twisted and still unfathomable feeling in the pit of his stomach from when his dad took him out for breakfast in the morning and it was the best food he’d had in years, and knowing that when Dean came back it’d be canned beans on toast again or Lucky Charms because Dean never made anything good for breakfast because Dean was the _worst_ —

“Sam?”

“He… he was here.” Sam’s chin jerks sideways like he’s trying to shake it off, shake off the thought of it. “On a case? On his birthday?”

“It was his first solo hunt.”

“Jesus. _Jesus_.” Sam blows out a breath. “What— what was he hunting?”

Cas suddenly looks down at his phone, doing nothing at all, leaving Sam to say, “Hello, Father,” as another priest walks past the barn, nodding at them.

Once he’s gone, Cas looks up. “Two ghosts, I believe. Two nuns who had fallen in love with each other and committed suicide in the face of their discovery.”

A threat, never fully formed. “Did— did Dad? Did Dad know that was the hunt?”

“Yes. He sent Dean with all the information he had.”

Yeah, all right. Sam can put the pieces together, never had any trouble with that, except for all the times he did when he was a kid, apparently. Christ.

“Sam?”

“You were right,” Sam scrapes out. “Wasn’t your business to say.”

Cas sighs. “Sam…”

“No, I—” Sam laughs at himself. Angry, and taking it out on Cas, when the man who deserves it has been dead more than a decade and twice over. “I didn’t mean that. And it’s not like Dean ever would’ve told me.”

“Are _you_ going to tell me?”

Sam looks at him. Cas looks… he looks really, genuinely confused, still. That he has access to all of the disparate pieces of Dean’s life, all the events like stars, and can’t see well enough to put together the constellation even now, even with what the two of them are… it doesn’t make any sense.

But then again, maybe it makes perfect sense, what with the frankly oceanic blind spot the two of them have around each other.

“What did Dean feel, about that memory?” Sam watches Cas struggle with it. Eventually, before Cas has to make the decision to say no to him, Sam says, “I’ll tell you. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t jealous of me, or— or cold that night, or, I don’t know, happy with the hunt. Right? He wasn’t any of those things.”

“No. He wasn’t.”

“He was lonely.” That, Sam can tell for certain, and Cas’s tightening mouth confirms it. “Think, Cas. Why would Dean — who saw me and Dad the same day, and who’d see us the next day — be lonely, on a hunt Dad sent him on? Barely a half hour drive away?”

“He thought—” Cas closes his eyes. “He thought you’d leave.”

“He thought we _might_ leave.” Sam puts his hand on Cas’s forearm. “Listen to me. He thought we might leave if he fucked it up. He thought Dad would take me away if he didn’t do a good job lighting a couple of lesbian nuns on fire. You understand?”

“Yes.” Cas runs a hand over his mouth, and then steps out from under the barn’s doorway, too, follows Sam into the plains. “I understand.”

* * *

The back of the chapel faces out onto a wide stretch of land, just grasses and trees and the sun that can’t quite win over the breeze down here on the ground. Dean would love a drive through it, would love to watch the gentle brown hills sweep past him, but stuck on his feet, here, his own smallness overwhelms him. This isn’t his home.

“Nice view,” is what he says to the kid smoking against the wall like a prisoner up for execution.

She flinches. “Jesus Christ.” She eyes him, and Dean walks up closer. “Who’re you?”

“I’m, uh…” He looks at her. She looks fine, well-fed, none of the signs Dean had seen every once in a while the last time he was here, not even the quiet ones Dean has learned to keep an eye out for since, in the absence of anything else. But, still. She’s scared of something. “I’m not mission staff,” he settles on eventually.

“Yeah, figured.” Evidently deciding he’s not going to report her for underage smoking or whatever, she sucks in some more smoke, and then looks back at him. “What do you want?”

“Name’s Dean.”

“That’s nice.”

“I mean—” Christ. Dean’s bombing with a sixteen year old potential witness. Embarrassing. “Look. I know there’s been some pretty awful stuff happening around here.”

The girl swallows. “Right.”

He stands there, watching her. Watches her finish off her smoke and then get another one out of the pack in her shirt pocket. “Those’ll kill you.”

She snorts. “They can get in line.”

Dean exhales. He finally closes the distance, setting his back against the church so he can look out at the plains next to her. He wonders what she sees in it.

“I know what stuff you’re talking about,” she says eventually, halfway through her second cigarette — or, the second one Dean’s seen. “You’re here for the suicides.”

“Yeah. Seems unusual for a wash of ‘em to hit all at once, right?”

“I dunno.” She shrugs, toes the grass. “Sometimes you just need inspiration.”

“Oh. Well I— uh—”

“Shit, don’t hurt yourself. I’m not gonna off myself. Gonna get outta here once I graduate.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Gonna become a teacher. So we can have a half-decent one at the school on the rez, so we don’t have to keep comin’ here.”

Dean doesn’t look at her, doesn’t think she’d appreciate it. Just says, “I’m sure you’d be more than half-decent.”

“You haven’t seen me lose my patience.”

“Sometimes kids need discipline.”

“More often they don’t.” And then she says, “You friends with the mission folks?”

Dean swallows. “No.”

She turns to him and he meets her eyes. “Are you lying to me?”

“No.”

She tilts her head and suddenly looks— looks so much like Cas that Dean’s stomach turns with it. And then she nods decisively, and settles back against the church. Looking out onto her land, she says, “Someone died recently. Staff member.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be.” She lights a third smoke against the mostly-finished one in her hand, then presses the stub against the church wall. This kid. “Apparently had a rep for, y’know. Fucking kids out in the barn.”

Jesus. “Jesus.”

“Yeah. You’d think we’d have learned not to send our kids to be taught by white people.” She laughs. “Place gets more money than the rez school, though, so—”

“Incoming.” Dean watches her put out the cigarette against the wall, and pat her pockets for one deep enough to hide the pack.

Finally, as the pair of nuns threatens to become real people rather than distant shadows, she looks at Dean, and he lets her give him the half-finished cigarette and half-empty pack, which he slides into his back pocket.

“Mr. Winchester,” one of the nuns says, pleasantly enough. She frowns at the kid. “Amanda.”

“Sisters,” Amanda says, sweet as pie, and Dean echoes her.

They finally stroll off, and Amanda lets out a breath. “Fuckin’ hate this place.”

“So, uh.” Dean realizes he has to get back to Sam and Cas, has no idea what they’re up to. “The kids who’ve, you know.”

“I know it wasn’t suicide,” she says. “You think I’m stupid? A ten year old ties a hangman’s noose to a roof beam twenty feet up?”

“I don’t think you’re stupid at all.”

“They were… used to be survivors. It’s Keelan, covering up his tracks. I can see it, even if the staff won’t.”

Explains the hostility they’ve been met with, when last time Dean was here the mission was antsy to get him on the job. Pointing the finger at a staff member, even a dead one — not good for PR. “Keelan?”

“James Keelan, yeah.”

“Can you think of any other kids who might be in danger?” It’s the worst thing he can imagine. To be free of it — Christ, a ten year old kid. A ten year old. A ten year old thinking, _at least he’s dead now, at least he’s dead_ , and then getting—

“You need a list?”

“It just. Y’know, we’ll try to send Keelan back to where he belongs soon as we can, but we can keep an eye out for who his next victims might be, before and after. Make sure nothing goes wrong, make sure the job’s done.”

Her mouth twists. “Don’t— don’t tell them I sent you, but. Sadie. Matthew. Those are the only ones I know about for sure.”

“Sadie and Matthew. Got it.” Dean takes another look around for witnesses and then gives Amanda her cigarettes back. He ducks to catch her eyes. “Hey. You gotta stay alive long enough to give your community another option, all right? Can’t teach high school English if you’re dead of lung cancer at thirty.”

Amanda smiles, turning the box over in her hands. “I was thinking about history, actually.”

“History’s a good subject.” Dean pushes himself off the church walls. “I’m gonna give you my phone number. If you’re in any trouble, anytime, gimme a call.”

She nods, and Dean fishes around in his wallet for something to write on, eventually settling on a Gas’n’Sip receipt from two months ago, why the hell does he still even have that.

“Where will he go, when you stop him?” she asks, when Dean’s already six feet away.

Dean pauses. Turns around. He still hasn’t really settled on an answer, broadly speaking — Dean thinks they probably go to wherever they were headed before, or maybe Purgatory, or maybe the Empty. Or nowhere at all. But he knows what Amanda wants to hear, so he says it. “Hell, I hope.” Tilts his head at the church. “His type of Hell.”

“Good.” She twists her mouth, and lights her half-finished cigarette, and Dean doesn’t stick around to see if she gets through another one after that.

* * *

Castiel fumes with it. The toxic spill of it, unholy over the ground, raises the hairs on his neck. He has no quarrel with Christians, conceptually, although the vast majority of them are largely unbearable; but places like these, the hypocrisy of them, the voluntary ignorance, cut him at the ankles, leave him stumbling by day as their prophets do by night.

They walk towards this Sister Beatriz’s room. He recalls the spitting argument between Sam and Dean, the way Sam had said _I’m not putting you in a room with this person ‘til you tell me what’s goin’ on_ to which Dean had replied _She’s eighty goddamn years old by now, what the hell kinda danger you think she poses? We just need to make sure we’re not gonna miss anything if we only burn Keelan’s bones_. And Sam had set his shotgun down, hard, next to Dean’s hands monument-still against the desk chair, had said _what the hell has you so worked up_ and Dean, jaw clenched tighter than it’s been since the end times, hissed _I’m not goddamn worked up, Jesus fucking Christ, Sam_.

Castiel had been silent. He is nearly always silent here, feels more angelic than he has since, perhaps, the first Apocalypse. If he opens his mouth no one at all will understand him.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean says softly, Sam a few steps ahead. Castiel keeps his eyes on his feet. He is not Cas here. “How’re you doin’?”

“This place is the worst place I’ve ever been to.”

Dean’s mouth curls up, and something in Castiel softens. Yes, there it is. He knows who he is when Dean looks at him. “I don’t know about that, man.” Then he shrugs. “I mean, yeah, it’s pretty desolate, but considering we live in Kansas—”

“Not the land,” Castiel interrupts. “This land is beautiful. It’s…” Castiel shakes his head. He’d thought human language was inadequate generally, but English, it seems, is its own unique curse. Instead, he says, “I am saying that this place is evil.”

Dean nods thoughtfully. The sun is warm on him, makes an invitation out of his broad, hunter’s shoulders, his strong hands, his gentle chin. Castiel won’t kiss him here, but he will once they’re in the Impala. He’ll press a kiss to his wrist, and devote himself to Dean’s collarbones, and he won’t think any more of God.

The room where Sister Beatriz lives is a one-room bungalow at the end of a mostly grown-over track leading from the back of the dormitories. The walls are white, like the church, punctuated by one round window and a small, wooden door.

Dean knocks. “Sister Beatriz?”

“Come in.”

They all have to duck their heads to pass through the door, but the house itself is tall enough for them all to stand in, fortunately. The owner of the frail, rattling voice is seated on a loveseat under the window, more brown than pink, now, bleach stains on the cushion corners.

“Sister Beatriz, hi,” Dean says, all ease in his shoulders, not a worry to be seen except for the light tapping of his thumb against his jeans. “I don’t know if you remember me… I’m Dean Winchester, I had a job here, years ago.”

“Dean _Winchester_ ,” Beatriz breathes, chuckling, and Dean laughs, too. Castiel and Sam look at each other awkwardly. “As I live and breathe. Well come here, boy, lemme take a look atcha.”

Dean obligingly walks forward into the light coming in through the glass, and Beatriz’s wrinkled face arranges itself into a broad grin. “Oh, just as handsome as ever, I see.”

“I don’t know about that, ma’am,” Dean says, smiling and smiling, but his tapping becomes a clenched fist, thumb fidgeting in and out. “Now, lemme introduce you— this is my brother, Sam, and my friend Castiel.”

Sam and Castiel walk forward, and Sister Beatriz eyes them, too. “What a handsome set of young men, Dean. Now, what’s all this about?”

“Uh, yeah—” Sam clears his throat, clearly anxious to get into the case. He pulls out a file. “We’re here, actually, looking into the deaths of, of Jamie, Kilsa, and Pedro. Can you tell us anything about that?”

Beatriz sighs. “Sad, sad business,” she whispers. “Yes, I knew those children. Troubled, the lot of them.”

She eyes them all, although her gaze settles on Castiel the longest. And then she says, “Do have a seat, would you? I’d make you coffee or tea or something, but my knees aren’t so good. But you’re welcome to take what you’d like from the kitchen.”

“No, thank you,” Castiel says stiffly. Dean sits down next to Beatriz before either of them can object, so Sam and Cas take the two chairs opposite the sofa.

Sam’s nodding already. “Yeah. We heard about the trouble, looks like they all—” He catches Dean’s glare, and pretends to look down at his notes for a refresher. “—had, uh, run-ins, with a, a teacher? James Keelan?”

Beatriz shakes her head. “I know. I know. Kids will make up rumors that ruin a man’s life. But I don’t blame them, considering how they grew up.”

“How they— right,” Sam repeats. He shutters his gaze down to the floor. “Right.”

“This Keelan guy,” Dean says. “I know he’s passed, now. But I’m worried a lot of the kids are still thinkin’ about him, about the— the rumors, like you said. And I’m wondering, do you know if there’s anything of his around the mission? Something that might— I don’t know, might, uh—”

“Trigger,” Sam says finally, “something that might trigger one of the kids, or, uh, spark a, uh, cause a disturbance. Be used for a— a— a school prank, that kinda thing.”

“Exactly.” Dean puts his hand on Beatriz’s forearm. “Can you think of anything like that?”

Beatriz puts her hand on top of Dean’s. She holds it there, feels him, and Castiel feels his distance from Dean acutely. “I’m not sure,” she says, and then sighs, releasing Dean. “I prayed for those kids when they passed, you know. Every one of their souls to be with the Lord.” She points at Dean. “I prayed for you, when your father sent you here the first time, and it seems our holy Father has brought you back again.”

Sam’s file closes with a muted slap. Dean pulls his hand back into his own lap. Before either of them can speak, Castiel can’t stop himself from saying, “I can assure you that God has nothing to do with this.”

Sister Beatriz turns back to him. “I knew there was something about you,” she says, “something that called out to me.”

“You are a woman of true faith. I can sense that. I only wish you could see how completely this faith has turned you from the truth of the world around you.”

“Castiel,” she says, and his name is wrong in her mouth, is at once the devotion of a stricken congregation and the mockery of a thousand Leviathan and the alleluia of the Host at the Beginning. It is violence. “The world around us is only temporary. The world above is eternal.”

Castiel looks away. It is exhausting to argue with a faithful person, especially when they are, in technical terms, correct. To the arm of Beatriz’s loveseat, he asks, dully, “Can you think of anything James Keelan might have felt attached to?”

“I know why you’re asking. You think James killed those children. And I say it isn’t so — it’s the work of the Devil, it’s the Devil in those kids, in all those kids, just as the Devil marks all of us until we make the choice to turn towards the Lord.”

At every mention of the word Devil, Sam flinches in his chair, curling back until somehow, in this shed barely more than twice the size of the Impala, he looks like the smallest thing in the room. Dean asks, “Sammy—”

“M’fine,” Sam says.

“Oh, my boy,” Beatriz says, turning fully towards Sam. “I helped your brother. I prayed over him, helped him come to his senses, turned him towards the way. I can help you, too, if you give yourself over to the power of Christ.”

“No,” Sam says, “no, I’m all right—”

“I wondered at the two of you, sittin’ over there, and you, you’ve got the Devil in you, boy, haven’t you? The Lord is a mighty protector, a salve for all wounds—”

“I don’t want to hear about the Lord, thank you,” Sam says tightly.

“I’d like to be in prayer, I think,” Sister Beatriz announces abruptly. “Would you boys excuse me? Unless you’d like to join me.”

“No, I—” Dean stands up. “Thank you for your time, Sister. If you can think of anything at all…”

“Oh, yes. I know. I know.” She shakes out her wrists. “Sometimes I think he’s doing them a favor. That these children can be in the light of God, rather than fumbling around in the mud with the rest of us.” She turns her eyes, clear and brown and shot through with sunlight, up at Dean, as devotional as any saint. “Eighty years, I’ve been here on this earth, just waiting to go to my home with the Lord.”

“But they’re— these are _kids_ ,” Sam says. “They’re not ready to go home. They want to live, _here_ , to grow up and make a difference and change and figure out who they are. And they’re being murdered. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

Beatriz looks away from them both. Eventually, she says, “James was particularly attached to his crucifix, and his notebook. They both ought to be in his office.”

“Thank you,” Dean says. “We’ll— we’ll let you be.”

Sam pushes himself up, but Castiel remains seated. “I’d like to join you, if that’s all right, Sister Beatriz.”

“Yes, of course, Castiel,” she replies. Sam and Dean pause, but Castiel waves them off. He watches them step outside, closing the door behind them, hears them wander for a bit before, presumably, circling back around to try to listen in through the other side of the house.

“Will you make me a pot of coffee, Castiel?” Beatriz asks.

“Yes.” Castiel fills up the kettle with the water in the sink, familiar after completing the task so many times in the bunker. He sets it on the burner and turns on the heat. He stands there, waiting for it to boil.

“You know a watched pot never boils, Castiel,” Beatriz calls from the sofa.

Rather than arguing the pointlessly obtuse idiom, Castiel turns around. “Do you know the source of your name, Beatriz?”

Beatriz’s cheeks dimple with a small smile. “The source as in, who gave it to me, or the meaning of it?”

Castiel frowns. English, again — so imprecise. “Its meaning.”

“Beatification. Beatified.” She laughs. “Close, maybe, to beautiful.”

“What is beatification to you, Sister Beatriz?”

The kettle whistles behind him, and Castiel busies himself with making coffee using Beatriz’s deceptively complex French press. Finally, when the coffee is ready, he settles down across from her, again, the coffee cooling on the low table between them.

“In its simplest definition, beatification is being blessed, I suppose. Or becoming a blessed person who might then intercede on our behalf in prayers to the Lord. Beatification is love, Castiel,” she says. “The love of all people for our Father, and the hope that our prayers might be answered in and through Him.”

“Yes, but—” He sighs. “Isn’t beatification the love, also, of all people for each other? The idea that a soul can intercede not through good works or veneration, but through love?”

“Castiel,” she says slowly. “How else would you show love?”

He would show it just by feeling it. He would show it by making a home within himself for the other, by telling the world about him; he would show love by saying _this is what he taught me,_ by being good, being better, by growing and changing, because of him.

But this conversation is not, of course, about Dean Winchester. “You misunderstand me, I think,” Castiel says. “I’m referring to the love of the beatified. _From_ the beatified. Do you understand? I’m saying that beatification is only feasible if the dead love you, too.”

Sister Beatriz pours herself a mug of coffee. “You risk ancestor worship, Castiel.”

“If you must worship God, then, and not your fellow humans,” he says, “see Him in all His creatures as they are.”

“That His light may shine through them, yes,” she says.

“No.” Castiel puts his hand on her arm. “That it already does. It always will, inevitably, unconditionally. There is no need to be saved, for there is no Devil greater than human cruelty, no God greater than human love.”

Beatriz huffs out a breath. She says, “I’m old now, Castiel. I won’t give up my faith over one cup of coffee.”

“Will you give it up when it kills another child?”

“Who am I to question the Lord’s will?”

Castiel studies her. She is old, it’s true. She might have months left, or years. She might pray over no one or over thirty children in the rest of her life. Castiel knows, can put together the pieces, now, of what her prayer might have meant to Dean at seventeen.

And she will not give up her faith over one cup of coffee.

“You will be relieved to know that this was not a test,” Castiel says as he stands. “Ten years ago, I might have struck you down.”

The sunlight, when he leaves the room where Sister Beatriz lives, spears through him. He knows again who he is.

* * *

They decide to hit the grave after sundown. God knows why — they’ve got the okay from the staff who’re in the know, and it doesn’t seem like anybody else out here uses the barn on the regular. Still. Dean’s antsy over one thing or another, and Cas is bristling like a rabid porcupine, and Sam isn’t really ready to do anything in view of the sky out back of a Catholic church.

Stupid, is what that decision was. Keelan’s throwing Cas around like he’s about as heavy as a sack of feathers while Sam and Dean try to dig faster, Christ.

“You good up there?” Dean calls. Sam blows his hair out of his face and concentrates on digging faster. The crucifix is burning a hole in his pocket.

“Keep digging,” Cas grunts eventually, and Dean’s shoulders settle. In that new moon, the sky clear and dark as anything, orphic as the ocean, the only things Sam can see are the grave getting taller around him and the shape of his brother, down in it with him. Everything smells like soil.

But, eventually, they hit coffin. “You—?” Dean asks, and Sam nods, so Dean hops out to help Cas swipe crowbars through Keelan’s ghost while Sam stays down in the muck.

“Shit,” Sam hisses, prying the coffin open to dump the notebook and the crucifix in there. He shouldn’t have read the damn thing. _I think of the Father’s touch as coming through me_ , he’d written, the sick fucking bastard, and Sam had wondered whether Lucifer felt the same way.

“Jesus—”

“Dean—”

“Guys?” Sam pulls himself out of the coffin once it’s open, pours gasoline down before he looks up. “Oh— _Jesus_ fuck, Dean—”

“Light it,” Cas says, cradling Dean’s head — unconscious, he’s unconscious, he’s not— he’s not— and Sam fumbles for his matches. The whole mess of it goes up and, a second later, so does Keelan. Sam can feel Lucifer’s touch in his soul, shivering cold in the freezing Wyoming air, this whole thing’s a fucking nightmare and Sam can barely see.

“He okay?” Sam asks, sprinting around the grave to get to them. “Fuck, what happened?”

Dean blinks. Fuck. _Fuck._ “Hit the thingy,” Dean slurs, swinging his hand in the direction of the gravestone. “Shit… hurts.”

“I wish I could help you,” Cas says, holding him. Up at Sam, he says, “I think he’s concussed.”

“Yeah.” Sam blows out a breath. Shit. At least they caught the guy, and anyway, Sam had thought— seeing him like that, a fucking pieta, he’ll take a concussion any goddamn day. He’s lived enough years without his brother. “Okay. Let’s get him up.”

“I can carry him,” Cas says. Sam doesn’t want to say anything, but he takes up the duffle bag and waits for Cas to stumble under Dean’s weight. Because Cas is human, and Dean is heavy, and Sam is cold. He’s too cold to speak.

Cas heaves up, Dean’s arm around his shoulders. “Let’s go, Dean.”

Sam watches Dean grip Cas’s far shoulder tight, pull at his jacket with his free hand. Dean winces as they walk, and Sam figures it’s the concussion nausea. “Did he know?” Dean asks, hoarse, wild-eyed, keeps his head upright for a full three seconds before he slumps forward, exhausted by it, probably. “S’that why— why he sent me here?”

Fuck. Sam can’t watch this. Eventually he works up the guts to say, “Just walk forward a few steps, man. Don’t need to think about it.”

Cas and Dean trudge forward a few steps, steady as tacked horses. Sam follows them, and then, when Cas trips over a branch and Dean makes a really goddamn pathetic little sound, Sam ducks under Dean’s arm to take his other side. He should’ve just insisted on it at first. He’s just. He’s always scared.

“I did it right,” Dean whispers, so quiet Sam might not’ve heard it if he’d still been behind them, “Did he know? But I’m not— I wouldn’t—”

“Your brother’s right, Dean,” Cas says, and that settles something in Sam, the knowledge that this is Cas, not Lucifer, that that’s Dean, that this is Earth. “You need to concentrate. Don’t worry about anything else now.”

They make it maybe a quarter of a mile before Dean starts to flag again, feet dragging as Sam and Cas half-drag him across the plains, his whole body flinching. Another quarter-mile to go before they get back to the Impala.

“Halfway there, man,” Sam says. “You okay?”

It takes a few seconds, but Dean eventually says, “Yeah,” his voice cracked like a canyon.

After a century of pilgrimage, a nighthawk introduces the morning with its electric creak and boom. The car is in sight. Another step, Sam thinks. “I wouldn’t have left you alone,” Dean mumbles into Sam’s shoulder. “Even if someone found out about— no matter what they did to me, I never woulda left you alone. I wouldn’t have done that. Dad didn’t need to worry about that.”

The nuns. The fucking _nuns_. Jesus Christ.

Dean hacks in a breath, suddenly, loud in his throat, and Sam and Cas look at each other, and push faster.

“Or w’s it just me,” he says, quieter, and Sam’s eyes burn. “Did he need me to burn it out of the ground, ‘cause I did it, Cas— Cas, you know I did—”

“Dean—”

“Took me a lifetime to grow it back,” Dean says, breath hitching, tears streaming down his face, and Sam finally unlocks the fucking car.

Once they get him settled into the back of the car, in the light of the distant sunrise, Sam realizes Dean’s ankle is fucking wrecked. Fuck. “I’ll stay in the back with him, Sam,” Cas offers. “Drive us to the mission.”

“Yeah.” Sam walks around to the driver’s seat, waits for Cas to get settled in, Dean’s feet in his lap. Resolutely doesn’t look at Dean’s face, flinching every time Sam hits a bump in the road. He hadn’t said a word about it on the walk. Why didn’t he say anything?

“You were right,” Dean murmurs up at Cas, barely audible over the hum of the Impala. Sam takes a left and finally gets back onto pavement after the awful gravel road, the dust clearing from his windshield. “This place is evil.”

“You survived it,” Cas says, just as quiet, hand over Dean’s. Sam pulls in just in front of the dormitory. “Some light always makes it through.”

Sam barely feels the cold anymore, but Dean starts shivering when Sam pulls him out of Cas’s lap. Between the two of them, they manage to get Dean in the front door and into bed, foot elevated. “Might need a cast, dude,” Sam says.

Dean blinks. God, he’s so concussed. “If I have to go back out there and into a hospital I’ll be— be so g’damn pissed at you guys—”

“We might be able to set it here.” Castiel frowns at the ankle. “I’ll push up your jeans so we can take a look at it.”

Cas is halfway through doing it when Dean huffs a belated, “All right, Dr. Sexy.” Sam rolls his eyes, tosses the duffle onto the other bed. They have one roll of adhesive bandage left, which isn’t much, but is hopefully enough to keep Dean’s ankle in one piece between here and a real hospital.

Cas is tenderly bullying Dean over his carelessness (or whatever — Sam tries not to get involved in their lover’s spats) when — like thunder, a rupturing crescendo — someone bangs on their door.

* * *

Cas leaves him to go open the door. Everything is happening so _fast_ — and Dean knows what a concussion feels like, figures it’s not so bad if he hasn’t even puked once, but still. He’s not ready for visitors. And— Jesus, that’s Amanda. “Amanda?”

“You know this girl?” Cas asks, frowning.

“Hi,” Amanda says, uncertain now, something strange in her voice. “You said, uh. You guys deal with weird crap, right?”

“Oh,” Sam says, “you’re— uh, one of the students.”

“Hey,” Dean says, feeling excluded. “I’d get up, but I’m kinda laid out. But we got the guy, if that helps anything. Jesus, Cas, let ‘er in.”

“Apologies,” Cas murmurs, stepping back.

Amanda closes the door carefully behind her. “That’s good,” she says quietly. “But, uh. I just— I think I saw something, like a few minutes ago? So I don’t know when you got Keelan, but…”

“Shit,” Sam says. “Another ghost, you think?”

“Yeah, must be.” Fuck. Dean hates being out of commission. “Amanda. You…” Thoughts. Put your thoughts together. “Uh, get a good look at whatever it was? What did you see?”

“I know who it is,” she says. She keeps looking at her feet. Oh, kid. “It’s— Jamie, you know, the. The first one.”

“The—” Dean closes his eyes. “You’re sure? You saw her?”

“She tried to hang me,” Amanda whispers, hand over her neck, and Sam stills. Dean breathes out. Okay. Okay. “I saw her face.”

An awkward silence runs through the room. All right. “It wasn’t her, not really,” Dean says, as softly as a man like him knows how, once it looks like both Sam and Cas are dropping the ball on this one. “Staying here after you’re dead… s’not good for you.” He inhales, trying to clean the nausea out of him. “Makes people go crazy.”

“I’m not stupid,” Amanda snaps, which, fair enough.

“Okay, so,” Sam starts, hoisting the duffle over his shoulder, “Jamie’s trying to— to help people along, you think? Like, end your suffering kinda deal?”

“It makes sense,” Cas says. “Maybe she was trying to protect them from Keelan’s ghost. I suppose we’ll never know.” He sighs heavily. “Amanda, I hate to ask, but… do you know where Jamie is buried?”

“Yeah. Out in the cemetery.” Her face crumples, like she’s about to cry, but her eyes stay dry. She whispers, “She wasn’t big, and the school graves aren’t deep. Shouldn’t take you long.”

“Fuck.” Sam runs a hand over his face, and then says, “Okay. Cas, you wanna— you comin’ with me?”

“M’not letting you go by yourselves—”

“You’re concussed and your ankle’s fucked, Dean,” Sam says, and okay, yeah. “And anyway, I — I mean, no offence, Amanda, but someone should stay with you.”

Amanda drops into the chair at the desk. “Fine.”

Cas says, “I should stay with them.”

Sam pauses. Dean watches him swallow, clench his hand on the strap of his bag. And he says, “Look, with my— I mean. We don’t know what kind of criteria this ghost uses, but.” He shrugs. Carefully, tonelessly, he says, “I might be a target. Could use the backup.”

Dean closes his eyes. The injustice of it. That Sam had to say that — that he said it like that, so deliberately easy. While Dean lies back, pampered on his bed.

“Of course,” Cas acquiesces, putting his coat on. “Be safe, Dean.”

“Yeah, you too. Both of you,” Dean says, and then turns to Amanda. “You gotta help me ward up this room, protect us,” he tells her, trying to get her to look up at him while Sam and Cas make their way out. “Can you look in that bag over there on the table?”

While Amanda’s on her way across the room to open Dean’s bag, Dean catches Cas’s eye. He just looks at him. An easy hunt, he’d said it would be, and it’s gone to shit like everything else. He wanted it to be easy, but Cas is prickly here, walks heavy on the earth like a yoked ox, not to mention the flat and deliberate nothing in Sam’s face.

“Take care,” Cas says eventually, and walks out the door before Dean can say anything to him.

“What am I looking for?” Amanda says once the door closes behind them, and Dean gets his head in the game.

“The salt, the shotgun, and if you see anything iron in there, get it out for yourself.” Dean pushes himself up so he’s sitting, at least, not lying on his back waiting to die, Christ. “Can you make a line of salt in front of the door?”

“Seriously?” She does it, though, hands steady as she pours an even, solid line at the threshold. Not a moment too soon, it turns out, because a banging starts at the door, the same overwhelming loudness of Amanda’s own knocking.

Amanda flinches back. “Shit.”

“Yeah. Windows, too, ‘kay?” And Dean says, “Gimme the shotgun, and you keep — you see a crowbar in there, maybe?”

Over the noise of presumably-Jamie at the door, Amanda pulls out both the gun and the crowbar. “Are you seriously gonna shoot a ghost?” Amazingly, she actually gives him the gun, which probably speaks more to her own sheer terror than Dean’s comforting and trustworthy aura. He probably shouldn’t even be handling firearms anyway, but needs must.

Dean cocks it, makes sure it’s got two shells in it. She got him a handful of extra ammo, too, which is some respectable efficiency. “The shells have salt in ‘em,” he says, “n’salt’s bad for the ghosts.”

“Right.” She slaps the crowbar against her palm, feeling the heft of it. “Lemme guess. Iron’s bad for ghosts, too?”

“You learn quick, kid.”

“Probably how I got away. I slammed her into my bedpost and she just— disappeared.”

“Ha. Nice.” Dean settles back into the pillows. Jamie has started a moaning wail that creeps into Dean’s throat. It’s not so bad at first, but after a few minutes he realizes he’s opened his mouth, is about to scream along with her.

“You want me to set your ankle for you?” Amanda asks, looking for all the world like she’s about to start screaming, too.

“You know how?”

“My dad took us out hunting a lot,” she says over the sound of Jamie’s voice, getting out the self-adhesive shit Sam insisted on getting. Dean guesses he’s earned an I told you so. “You gotta get to a hospital eventually, but I can keep you from getting worse, at least.”

“What’d your old man hunt?” Dean asks while she prods at his ankle, careful but not delicate, a true hunter’s kid.

“Rabbit, mostly. Elk sometimes, if they didn’t get scared off by the white guys with guns.”

“Damn.” Dean blinks up at the ceiling as Amanda wraps his ankle tight, exhales steadily when her fingers brush over the tender parts. Choking on his own voice, he asks, “You guys didn’t use guns?”

“Crossbows.” She pushes the tape down to stick it to itself. “Mechanical ones.”

“That’s cool.” Dean breathes in and then out, tries to push through his own pain and Jamie’s, pounding on the door.

Amanda sits down on the bed next to his ankle, turned halfway towards him. She studies the crowbar in her hands and Dean studies her, thinks about Sam burning up a seventeen year old’s rotting body while Dean listens.

Gently, he tries to ask it. “You’re not Sadie or Matthew.”

She shrugs. “Those were the ones I was sure about.”

God _damn_ it. Dean swallows. He keeps his voice steady. “Yeah.”

“I’m sure now, though.” She clutches that crowbar again, and Jamie’s voice dies down suddenly. Either Sam and Cas did it or she’s back out across those great plains to hassle them for getting too close. Dean would be touchy about his body, too, all things considered.

“What do you need?” Dean asks, once it seems like Jamie’s left them for good, or at least for a while. “I get that— where you are, right now, doesn’t feel like the safest place to be. How can I help?”

Face still, perfectly motionless, she asks, “Your ankle. Was it Keelan? You kill him again? For real?”

“Yeah. Burned him up, and his crucifix and his notebook.”

“Good.” She nods, and then— all at once, fast like mountain rapids, she starts crying, right there on the bed. “I gotta get outta here,” she whispers, voice hitching.

It takes Dean a minute, but he eventually settles on something to say. “I got a GED five years after I dropped outta high school, found a— a construction job, a good job, ten years later.” It’s stupid to think of any of his time with Lisa as a success, but hell, by normal metrics it kind of was. Almost unbelievable how easy it was to move in with her when he didn’t have a single legitimate piece of ID. “And my kid brother — Sam, the one with the long hair — he hopped around all through middle school an’ high school and he still got a full ride to Stanford. You don’t have to stay here to make something of yourself.”

She sniffs. “I don’t wanna be a mechanic or go to Stanford.”

Dean watches her pick at the quilt on the bed. For all he knows, the weight of his body is the only thing keeping her from ripping it apart. “What do you wanna do?”

“What’s that third guy do? The other one?”

Dean exhales. “Okay, that’s kind of— that’s his story. I’ll let him tell it if he wants to.” If there’s even a good way to talk about angels at a goddamn mission, fuck.

Amanda nods.

He hurts for her. Sixteen, and right at the start of the rest of her life with this hanging over her, this place, that asshole Keelan, and a strange man with a broken ankle. “Can I give you some advice? You can say no. And if you say yes, that don’t mean you gotta take it.”

She says, “Okay.”

“My advice is, tell someone. Eventually. Doesn’t have to be tomorrow. Hell, probably shouldn’t be. But maybe, y’know, next year, you’re at a different school, and you have a— a friend you trust, or something. And you say, this happened, and the guy who did it is dead so there’s nothing to report. That’s my advice.”

She looks at him, puzzled. “Why?”

Dean closes his eyes. His head hurts, so much. “‘Cause one day, maybe next week or ten years from now, you’re gonna feel sick to your stomach over it. You won’t be able to get outta bed from it.”

He remembers waking up between the whiskey hazes back when he came out of Hell. He remembers puking early in the morning and hoping that Sam wouldn’t wake up. No way could he have told Sam the truth of it; the halted and stuttering sentences he clawed his way through were already too much.

But if he’d called Bobby, maybe. He remembers after the apocalypse-that-wasn’t, when him and Bobby were the only things keeping each other alive for those hard and desperate years. He could’ve told him. Dean continues, “And if you tell someone, then you can call ‘em when that happens. And you can ask them for help. And they’ll get you outta bed.”

Amanda wipes her face. “You already know,” she says. “Can you— will you—”

“Yeah, all right,” Dean says, because he’s a sucker. “I mean, full disclosure, my life expectancy is pretty pathetic so I might die between now and the next time you call me, but yeah.”

She pulls a thread out of the quilt, and Dean lets her be. Jamie hasn’t come back, so Dean isn’t exactly shocked when Sam pushes the door open, dirt and sweat in his hair. “We’re all done. You guys good?”

“Yeah,” Amanda says, before Dean can do it. “Haven’t heard anything in a while.”

“Great.” Sam sets his shit down and Cas follows him in, silent and tense. Dean looks at him. He hasn’t touched him since they got here, except for the long march from Keelan’s gravesite. Funny, how getting a concussion can make you realize how idiotic your hangups really are. All Dean wants is for Cas to touch him.

“How’re you feelin’, Amanda?” Dean asks instead, because he’s the one who kept a solid four feet between him and Cas out of sheer terror this whole goddamn time. He hasn’t exactly earned his comfort here.

Amanda sniffs. “Good, actually.” She shrugs. “She isn’t watching me anymore. I didn’t realize she was watching me the whole time. Maybe they— maybe they both were.” She shivers, and Dean catches Sam slamming a shotgun too hard down on the table under the window.

Cas takes over before either Dean or Sam can fuck it up even worse. “She’s been sent to—” He pauses, and then says, “The spirit world.”

“You were going to say heaven, weren’t you?” Amanda isn’t offended, though, far as Dean can tell.

Cas’s mouth twists. “It was a mistake.”

Amanda goes back to picking at the quilt, the crowbar forgotten in her lap. Desperate to make her look more like the fiery kid he met under that clear sun, Dean clears his throat. To the room at large, he says, “Well, Amanda set my leg up real nice, so I don’t think I gotta go to the hospital.”

“I explicitly said that you should go to a hospital,” Amanda says, rolling her eyes.

Dean laughs. “What’re they gonna do, line up the bone?”

“Yes,” Sam says. He’s still looking out the window at the rising sun. Might be too soon for Sam to take a joke. “Literally yes.”

“Well, s’already lined up,” Dean says, “just has to stay that way.”

“You also have a concussion,” Cas points out. Admittedly, Dean had kinda forgotten about that.

“Go to the hospital,” Amanda says. She stands up. “And… look. Thanks, I guess.”

“Don’ mention it,” Dean replies, because like hell is he gonna let a kid thank him for this fucking shitshow. “You— take care of yourself, got it?”

“Sure.” She drops the crowbar on the table next to Cas. “Ten years from now. You gonna pick up the phone?”

Dean can barely imagine surviving another year, let alone ten. But he has reason to, now — him and Cas, and the smile that comes out of Sam every so often, and the girls, and Amanda, too. “Yeah,” he grits out, feeling it like an oath. She tilts her chin at him, and he nods back, like signing a contract.

And then she walks out the door, and Dean closes his eyes, more exhausted than he has any right to be.

* * *

Because Dean is a stubborn sonofabitch (Sam’s words), a source of everlasting stress to those who love him (Cas’s words), and a man who knows his body well enough to make decisions about it (Sam’s words, which Dean successfully leverages for personal gain), they decide on hitting a hospital once they’re back in Kansas rather than stopping in Wyoming.

“They already have our fake insurance on file,” Dean says. “I’m clearly fine, so it’s not time-sensitive, and it’s better to go somewhere where they won’t hassle us over our credit cards.”

“We haven’t had a credit card crap out on us for years,” Sam mutters, but he’s already putting Great Bend into the GPS, so Dean knows he’s won.

They take 287 out of Lander, get a taste of the hills out of the Rockies before returning to the real freedom of the Wyoming plains. Dean settles into it, the new rhythm of it: Sam in the driver’s seat, Cas in the back, and Dean, letting it happen. Easy with it, even. Maybe he’s just too tired to put up a fuss, but he suddenly wants to make Sam and Cas proud of him. He wants to try.

“Dad sent me on my first case there,” Dean says. He doesn’t expect it to come out smooth as it does, like it’s no big thing. “My seventeenth birthday.”

The silence in the car is… expressive. “You—” Dean flushes. Fuck. It’s _humiliating_. “Jesus Christ. You already knew.”

“Dean,” Sam says, already placating, “I asked him to tell me. It’s not Cas’s fault.”

“Whatever.” Dean watches the scrub pass them by, flattening into sameness. It’s only nine in the morning, because none of them wanted to sleep at the mission; they’re still driving into the sun. “I ain’t seventeen anymore.”

“Evidently,” Cas says from the backseat, which. Charming, Cas, really.

“I’m saying I’m not that kid anymore,” Dean says to his reflection in the sideview mirror, to the sunlight blinding his brother. “I’m not— shit, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with both of you at the same time.”

Sam asks, “What?”

“I know what you think about it,” Dean says, turning to look at him. Big. He wasn’t a man like this, not the last time Dean was on this road, sitting in the passenger seat of this car. Last time, Dean was looking at Dad’s face, and it was Sam in the backseat, fourteen and angry, so goddamn angry at everything and everyone. Sometimes Dean thinks he gets angry just to fit in.

He continues, “You think it’s just more of Dad being a piece of shit—”

“Dean—”

“An’ you’re right to say it.” Dean watches Sam’s mouth twitch, watches his eyebrows soften. Everything’s smaller in Sam, now, none of that riotous fury from high school. Maybe it’s just by virtue of scale; he’s big enough that he can hold it all in. Still. Dean worries that it’s more sinister, that there isn’t much to hold in at all, ever since Lucifer got his hands inside Dean’s brother.

“I was so dismissive when you got back,” Sam confesses, still small, small as anything. “I thought Dad let you have a party.”

“Damn, really?” He chuckles. “I honestly don’t remember anything that happened after I wrapped the case up.”

“I shoulda trusted that you wouldn’t have left me like that,” Sam says. He glances over and he must see something in Dean’s face, because he adds, “Not— nothing happened, not like that. I just mean. You know.”

“Yeah.” Dean knows. He knows what being around Dad was like when it was just you. Maybe Sam had it different, on account of being both the younger of them and the only one who was strong enough to take it, but Dean couldn’t have told you that it was worse when Dad got physical. It was all the same rage, unfathomable, ricocheting in subsonic waves around him. Dean thinks — if Dad could whip his kid so bad he drew blood, if Dad could choke him up against a wall till he couldn’t breathe at all, if he could do all that — how broken was he inside, at the source of it?

There are hardly any roads off 287, just country driveways out into the land. Just the same cracked pavement, the same yardstick fence, the same intermittent mile marker, on and on. The empty center of North America is the loneliest place in the world.

“I might try to make cannoli to celebrate our safe return tonight,” Cas says abruptly.

Dean looks away from the expanse, twisting around to face Cas. His north star. Cas smiles, small, a little uptick to his mouth that Dean is obsessed with. He’s allowed to be, now. “I don’t think we should let you run around unsupervised in the kitchen,” Dean says.

“But I won’t be unsupervised,” Cas replies. He leans forward, close, puts his hand on Dean’s cheek. “You’ll be there. Won’t you?”

Ah. Dean sighs, helpless to it, to the warmth of Cas’s palm. He can’t help smiling even though it’s so goddamn corny. “Yeah, Cas.” He leans in for a kiss — just a small one, casual. The kind where you know you have a thousand more waiting for you. Pulls back to look at him, that sweet smile of his, those blue eyes. The love of his godforsaken life. “‘Course.”

“You guys are gross,” Sam grumbles, but Dean knows he’s secretly pleased. Dean turns back to face the road ahead. He forgot, for a second, but he knows it now. It isn’t lonely at all. It’s his way home.

**Author's Note:**

> The main case in this fic is the salt and burn of the ghost of a mission staff member who sexually abused students at the school, who is killing survivors of his abuse. At the end, the characters realize that at least some of the deaths were actually caused by the ghost of one of the survivors who committed suicide, and that person's body is salted and burned off-screen. The main OC in this fic is a sixteen year old girl who is a survivor of the staff member's abuse.


End file.
